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the berries are ripening so that the roots embedded in rich peaty soil will be kept moist at the same time that the sand above is dry.

The plants, when full-grown, cover the soil with a thick mat of vines, which in the early autumn are twinkled all over with ripe berries. Picking begins in mid-September, and lasts until the end of the month following. School keeps much of the summer in the cranberry districts, and there is a long autumn vacation to enable the children to help in the berry bogs.

During the picking season all the energies of the people are directed to harvesting the berries. Dwellings are closed from morning till night. Cooking is done in the evening or on rainy days, and in fair weather every one is on the marshes all the hours of daylight. The pickers wear their oldest clothes, and the women draw stocking-legs over their arms as a defence against briers.

If the weather threatens to be frosty, while the berries are still unpicked, brush fires are made at night along the edge of the bog. The fires are not expected to warm the air much, but they make a smoke, which settles over the level hollow of the marsh and serves as a protecting blanket.

Houses on the Cape are usually low and small, and many of them have shingled sides. The older ones often have a surprising number of various-sized windows in their gables. There are apparently windows for

the grown folks and windows for the children - three or four apiece; just as a certain man had a large hole cut in his barn door for the cat to pass through and a smaller one for the kittens.

Every town had its windmill before the days of railroads. The mill was a gray octagonal tower with a long timber in the rear slanting down to the ground where it entered the hub of a cartwheel. This timber served in some measure as a prop against the onset of the winds, but its main purpose was to enable a man, by rolling the cartwheel along, to turn the fans of the mill to face the breeze. A great circular rut was worn around the building by the wheel. These mills were set on high ground and served as landmarks, for there were no tall trees nor other objects that could be seen so distinctly on a far-off horizon, unless it was the meeting-houses, which also were commonly on an elevation.

The Cape lies very open to the winds, and the buffeting of the fierce sea gales is evident in the upheave of the sand dunes and the landward tilt of the exposed trees. These trees have a very human look of fear, and seem to be trying to flee from the persecuting storms, but to be retarded by laggard feet.

The outer side of the Cape presents a desolate succession of scrubby hills and hollows with rarely any cultivated land in sight, and the villages are for the most part on the low-lying and more protected inner side. On this side the water is often as smooth and

quiet as a pond, but the sea is never at rest on the other shore.

There is an almost straight beach twenty-five miles long fronting the Atlantic, extending north from the

[graphic]

On Cape Cod's inner shore. The boat is a fisherman's dory

elbow of the Cape. Thoreau, the famous nature writer, once started at the southern end of this beach and walked the entire distance. He tells how every wave sent the foam running up the hard wet sand, sometimes making him beat a hasty retreat when a billow was unusually forceful. The sea was dark and stormy, and the breakers rushing to the shore looked like droves of a thousand wild horses with their white manes streaming far behind, and the long kelpweed that was tossed up from time to time suggested the tails of sea-cows sporting in the brine.

The early settlers waged war against blackbirds and crows to protect their corn, and against wolves and foxes that were prone to prey on the domestic animals, and they dug clams, fished with line and net, and watched from their lookouts for off-shore whales.

Digging clams at low tide

In many respects conditions are still the same. The sea is very near on both sides, and the people continue to be largely dependent on it for a living. It even furnishes a good many of them with all the wood they burn, for every landward gale strews the beach with wreckage and

drift rubbish, some

of which has value

[graphic]

for building purposes. Clams can be dug easily along shore, and, if a man chooses to go out in a boat, he can rake up quahaugs, a kind of deep-water clam, or he can catch fish.

One of the most exciting events to the dwellers of a waterside village is the arrival of a school of black

fish, a species of whale which attains a length of fifteen or twenty feet and a weight of a ton. When these fish are sighted leaping along at the surface of the sea, the men and boys run to the beach, jump into their boats, and row out to get on the seaward side of them. If they succeed in doing that, they turn toward the shore and strike on the sides of their boats and blow horns to drive the fish in to the beach. As soon as the fish are stranded their pursuers leap out and lance them, and tie ropes to their tails to keep the tide from carrying them away. After the receding water has left the bodies on the land the blubber is cut off. Kettles are brought to the shore, fires are made under them, and the blubber is boiled for the oil. In one of these blackfish drives over fourteen hundred were captured.

The nearness of the sea has played its part in enticing a large proportion of the Cape Cod men to a life of voyaging; and, when the voyagers return and tell their adventures to the young people at home, an eager desire is aroused in their hearers to seek fortunes on the water. Not all who embark come back. At Truro, near the end of the Cape, is a monument in the graveyard that bears this inscription :

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF 57 CITIZENS OF TRURO

WHO WERE LOST IN SEVEN VESSELS WHICH FOUN

DERED AT SEA IN THE MEMORABLE GALE OF OCT. 3,

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